By Amy KattanAs social media professionals, we can go on and on about why we love social media: it’s a great customer service tool and a highly effective way to reach a specific audience, among other things. Above all, social media works because it plays a key role in enabling the virality of messages: I tell 3 of my friends how much I like a product, they each tell 3 of their friends, who tell 3 of their friends, and so on. Before you know it, the message is reaching tens of thousands of people all over the world. If that’s not power, I don’t know what is.

If anyone knows about the virality of social media, it’s Likeable client University Medical. University Medical and the Likeable Media team worked together to develop a strategy around the AcneFree product line Facebook page launch. The plan was to build an AcneFree community and raise awareness of the brand by offering free samples of the new AcneFree Therapeutic Sulfur Mask and making the deal as shareable as possible in an effort to promote organic growth for the fan page. The AcneFree fan-gated welcome tab featured a form for fans to fill out as well as a share and tweet button on the offer. The hope was that with a November 15th launch date, the page would gain 30,000 likes by March 2012.

Well, if you haven’t already figured it out, they’ve already far surpassed this goal. By November 30th (just 15 days after the page launched), the AcneFree page had 41,000 fans with only $1,100 spent on advertising. The deal was shared on Facebook over 500 times and tweeted over 1,000 times. The most remarkable aspect of this campaign is that for 1 week, AcneFree’s “Talking About This” metric was not only higher than any other brand in their industry, but higher than the brand’s overall page likes!

The AcneFree page now has over 84,000 likes, almost 3 times as many likes as the company planned to have by March. And that my friends, is why we love social media.

See the SlideShare presentation below for the highlights of this campaign and visit the AcneFree page to receive your free sample!